U.S. guns going to insurgency?

Audit says poor accountability of arms for Afghans could aid enemy

FILE - In this Monday, March 12, 2012 file photo, former Taliban militants line up with their weapons to attend in a joining ceremony with the Afghan government in Mehterlam, east of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)
The Associated Press

FILE - In this Monday, March 12, 2012 file photo, former Taliban militants line up with their weapons to attend in a joining ceremony with the Afghan government in Mehterlam, east of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

A government audit released Monday said the U.S. has done a poor job tracking small arms supplied to Afghan national security forces, resulting in “real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents.”

Poor record keeping by the U.S. Defense Department is coupled with the Afghan government’s limited ability to account for or properly dispose of the weapons, which will “pose additional risks” to U.S. personnel, Afghan troops and civilians, according to the audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that concluded in June.

Since 2004, the Pentagon has provided Afghan forces over 747,000 weapons and auxiliary items valued at $626 million, including 465,000 small arms such as rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, and shotguns.

The weapons are transferred to Afghan control via the NATO coalition’s Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan.

A U.S. database tracking receipt of weapons in Afghanistan had missing or duplicated information in 43 percent of the entries, or 203,888 weapons, auditors found.

In Afghanistan, visits to weapons depots revealed missing weapons and botched paperwork. For example, at the Afghan National Army Central Supply Depot, which is controlled and managed by Afghans with the assistance of U.S. advisors, 740 of the 939 M16 rifles on the books were missing.

On the other end of the spectrum of problems, auditors also found more than 112,000 extra weapons not needed by the current force of about 352,000 Afghan soldiers and police. Most are AK-47 rifles phased out by the Afghan army for NATO weapons.

A proposed reduction in the size of the Afghan national security force to 228,500 personnel by 2017 is likely to result in an even greater excess of weapons, the inspector general concluded.

The Defense Department, responding to recommendations in the audit, said it would be premature to speculate on potential downsizing now, and that it is the Afghan government’s responsibility to determine whether they have extra weapons, not the U.S. Defense Department’s.

The Pentagon is in the midst of consolidating its databases used to track small arms procurements for Afghan forces, a project expected to be completed within six months.

It is also considering making future transfers of small arms to Afghan forces contingent on periodic Afghan-performed inventory checks, Michael Damont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, said in an undated letter included in the audit.

The Defense Department would encourage Afghan forces to make full inventories “by providing guidance on inventory procedures, accountability, and the importance of keeping these weapons out of insurgent hands,” he said.

It has no authority to order Afghanistan to conduct a 100-percent inventory check of small arms as auditors recommended; neither would such an inventory solve accountability problems, Damont said: “Weapons that are transferred … become property of the Afghan government and are under its control.”

However, the Pentagon is in the process of transferring some of the more than 11,000 extra AK-47s in the Afghan army to the police. It is also working to recover and dispose of more than 35,000 of the rifles that are damaged beyond repair.

Hoarding weapons is one way Afghans deal with capability gaps, the defense official noted.

“The Afghans have limited capability to repair or dispose of damaged weapons and thus have an incentive to maintain additional weapons to replace their losses,” Damont said.